Monte Cavallo, the popes' summer residence since the late sixteenth century, became a stake as soon as Rome was occupied in February 1808. It was there that General Radet, in the night of 5-6 July 1809, had the walls scaled and abducted Pius VII to take him to Savona. The pope was gone; the palace remained, and the Empire decided to move in.
Rome had just been annexed and proclaimed the Empire's second city; the heir would bear the title of King of Rome. A residence to match was needed. The works, entrusted to Raffaele Stern and then to Franco-Italian teams, lasted four years: imperial apartments, state rooms, neoclassical decoration, commissions to sculptors and painters fed by state patronage.
Canova, called on as the tutelary figure of Roman art, acted as intermediary in several of these projects, not without reluctance towards a power that had imprisoned the pope. Everything was ready in 1812 for an imperial visit that the Russian campaign, then the collapse of 1813, prevented for good. Napoleon never set foot in Rome.
Pius VII returned in 1814 and recovered a palace renovated at his jailer's expense. The Quirinal became a royal palace in 1871, then the residence of the presidents of the Italian Republic in 1946. The decoration commissioned by the Empire is still visible there: the most expensive trace of a Roman reign that never began.
